I am not sure if it has something to do with age. But I found both Kotlin and Swift share pretty much the same thing. Over Complexity. Objective C and Java works.
I am also wondering if Meta still uses PHP or Hack.
I never worked with Kotlin, but have kept it in the back of my head as the simpler alternative to Java if I had to target the JVM. What makes it more complex?
Disclaimer. Last time I seriously used Java, I was using Java 8, and I've only used Kotlin for screwing around with Android development on my own time. So what follows might be way off.
Kotlin provides a lot of 'clever' syntactic sugar and features that makes certain things that are quite verbose in Java, nice and compact in Kotlin. It also means that there are many way to achieve the same thing in Kotlin. Once you've learned everything it allows you to do things that would take a lot of Java in much fewer lines of code. But there is also just more 'stuff' to learn in the Kotlin language.
Java is a much simpler language than Kotlin with relatively few features, but this simplicity means you sometimes have to build quite verbose structures to achieve what you want.
So which is 'simpler' very much comes down to how you define 'simple'.
> I am also wondering if Meta still uses PHP or Hack
Meta’s WWW codebase is its oldest, and still written in Hacklang. Lots of internal tooling is also written in Hack.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more committed lines of Hacklang than any other language (although, a good chunk of that is codegen, vs other core languages where codegen is part of the build process).
I am not sure if it has something to do with age. But I found both Kotlin and Swift share pretty much the same thing. Over Complexity. Objective C and Java works.
I am also wondering if Meta still uses PHP or Hack.
I never worked with Kotlin, but have kept it in the back of my head as the simpler alternative to Java if I had to target the JVM. What makes it more complex?
Disclaimer. Last time I seriously used Java, I was using Java 8, and I've only used Kotlin for screwing around with Android development on my own time. So what follows might be way off.
Kotlin provides a lot of 'clever' syntactic sugar and features that makes certain things that are quite verbose in Java, nice and compact in Kotlin. It also means that there are many way to achieve the same thing in Kotlin. Once you've learned everything it allows you to do things that would take a lot of Java in much fewer lines of code. But there is also just more 'stuff' to learn in the Kotlin language.
Java is a much simpler language than Kotlin with relatively few features, but this simplicity means you sometimes have to build quite verbose structures to achieve what you want.
So which is 'simpler' very much comes down to how you define 'simple'.
I really miss Kotlin's null safety in Java
I really miss Java’s exception safety in Kotlin.
If Java ever ships Valhalla we might get null restricted types: https://openjdk.org/jeps/8316779
> I am also wondering if Meta still uses PHP or Hack
Meta’s WWW codebase is its oldest, and still written in Hacklang. Lots of internal tooling is also written in Hack.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more committed lines of Hacklang than any other language (although, a good chunk of that is codegen, vs other core languages where codegen is part of the build process).
Kotlin is awesome, good on Meta.